text: Radical polymerization of vinyl monomers, like methyl (metha)acrylate of vinyl acetate is a common (industrial) method to prepare polymeric materials. One of the problems associated with this method is, however, that the radical polymerisation reaction rate is so high that even at short reaction times the polymeric chains are exceedingly long. This has several practical disadvantages, especially for polymer processing (e.g. melt-processing). A solution to this problem is catalytic chain transfer, which is a way to make shorter polymer chains in radical polymerisation processes. The method involves adding a catalytic chain transfer agent to the reaction mixture of the monomer and the radical initiator.